I am Mary Dunne

by Brian Moore

  Movies, Jimmy was the one who started me going: he and I would go five nights a week in Toronto when and if we had the money. Hat disliked movies, although he pretended to like them. The only films he ever really wanted to go to were big coloured excitements which bore me. Terence likes movies and we go a lot. But Tee is professional in his interest, so most of the time we go to foreign films. And that’s all right. I go where I’m took, as the girl said. The only time I had rows with anybody about movies was during the period Hat and I lived in New York. There were so many good ones on then, but we hardly saw one of them. Sometimes I’d ask if we could go to one and Hat would say sure, and even pick a night, but when that night came, suddenly he’d have an article to finish or some phone calls to make and he’d go into his study and stay there until minutes before the last show, then rush out and we’d take a taxi to the theatre, almost always arriving after the last show had started. Then Hat would say he wasn’t going to see only part of the film and why didn’t we pop around to Downeys for a nightcap instead? Hat always did what he wanted, not what you wanted. Always.

  But Jimmy, I was thinking of Jimmy, he was the movie-goer. James Patrick Phelan, the Jimmy of twelve years ago when he was twenty-one and I was twenty. When I am an old woman, Jimmy will remain unchanged for me, a twenty-one-year-old boy with a big Adam’s apple, laughing with a nervous bark, inhaling his cigarettes the wrong way and coughing as though he will choke. Always the young boy, as Hat will always be the man I knew in those last months, irritable, touchy, skin slightly red and puffy, fingers combing nervously through his grey-streaked hair. Yes, Hat is cast as growing old, Jimmy as the boy I ran away from home with. Jimmy and I and the idiot, driving all together to Toronto, that’s how we started our married life. If you could call ours a married life.

  The idiot’s name was Tom Dawkins: his family was very rich. Poor Tom had a mental age of five or six and was afraid of planes and trains, so, every year when he spent Christmas with his mother in Toronto (his parents were separated), he had to be driven there. The old father, who lived in Halifax, offered Jimmy two hundred dollars and expenses to drive poor Tom to Ontario in a rented car and Jimmy (who knew I was daydreaming about joining Catherine Mosca’s acting school in Toronto) came to me and said that he had this big car and two hundred dollars and why didn’t we get married and go live in Toronto. Jimmy was on the outs with his family at the time: his mother had hoped he’d become a priest but, instead, he had flunked out of Dalhousie and was refusing to go to Mass on Sundays. I had just finished university but all my BA had got me so far was an offer of a filing clerk’s job at the government forestry lab in Fredericton. At twenty, my life stretched ahead of me like an empty horizon. I wanted to act, I wanted to do something which would take me away for ever from Butchersville, from the Maritimes, from the lives and jobs and ambitions of the other boys and girls around me. I know. It sounds mad to the me I am today. I liked Jimmy but I didn’t love him. Nor did he love me (he thought I was beautiful and wanted to go to bed with me), and I suppose you could say we used each other. But we didn’t know that, all we knew was the hopeless feeling of that empty ordinariness stretching down the years ahead of us. And, suddenly, here was something mad, a ride to Toronto, a two-hundred-dollar grubstake (it seemed a fortune to us, neither of us had ever lived away from home), and so, without a word to Mama or to Dick, I got up one morning, smuggled a suitcase out of the house, and took the bus over to Dartmouth where Jimmy and Jimmy’s friend O’Keefe were walking about in the snow on the street corner in front of an old white frame house belonging to a Unitarian minister and a few minutes later we were in the minister’s parlour getting married, with O’Keefe and the minister’s sister as witnesses, and, afterwards, we got on the bus and came back to Halifax and had our wedding breakfast in a greasy spoon. (I remember O’Keefe had bought a bottle of Irish whiskey in honour of Jimmy and they put some in my coffee. It was the first time I had ever had any liquor and I thought people must be crazy to drink it.) Then, after breakfast, we all got on another bus and went out to the rich part of town and got off at the very grand avenue where the Dawkinses lived and Jimmy set off all alone, going up the driveway beside a huge old grey mansion while O’Keefe and I waited, farther down the street, stamping our feet to keep warm behind the snowbanks shovelled up on the pavements, me with the remains of a ten-cent bag of confetti in my hair and bits of rice in the collar of my good coat and down my neck, O’Keefe holding my suitcase and cursing because Jimmy was gone for ages until, finally, along the street came this huge black Chrysler Imperial limousine with Jimmy driving it and beside Jimmy was the idiot, only he didn’t look like an idiot, he was a tall stout man with blond hair and a black homburg on his knees and he wore a suit with a waistcoat and a beautiful black overcoat with an astrakhan collar, and O’Keefe and I both had the same idea, this was the idiot’s father, so, even when Jimmy stopped the limousine right by us, we pretended we weren’t with him, we didn’t even look at him until he got out of the car and came up and said, ‘What’s up, aren’t you coming?’ And O’Keefe said, ‘That’s not him, is it?’ and Jimmy said, ‘Sure it is, it’s old Tom,’ and he went over and opened the front door of the limousine and old Tom smiled at us and Jimmy said, ‘All right, Tom, you get in the back, I want Mary to sit up front with me.’ Right away, old Tom stopped smiling and then a six-year-old in a forty-year-old body said, ‘No, I won’t. It’s my car and I always sit up front.’ So Jimmy thought about this for a moment and then he said, ‘No, it’s not your car, Tom, it’s just a rented car. Now, you get in the back.’ But old Tom shook his head. ‘It’s my daddy’s car,’ he said and that was that, there was no budging him, so I got in the back with O’Keefe and took a back seat to the idiot on my wedding day and we drove to O’Keefe’s house where O’Keefe kissed me and gave Jimmy the rest of the Irish whiskey and then we started off like escaping convicts, driving down those winter roads to freedom. I had told my family I was spending the weekend in Halifax with Shirley Davis. My plan was to announce my marriage as soon as we reached Toronto, which we thought would be in three days and so, for that reason, we drove late into the night until we reached the United States border at Calais, Maine. Which was our first mistake, because old Tom was hungry and kept wanting us to stop for dinner and when Jimmy said he wanted to get on to the border old Tom asked for a drink instead and Jimmy let him have it which was mistake number two, because it seems old Tom wasn’t allowed to drink and this was written down with a lot of other instructions which the old father had given Jimmy but which Jimmy had put in his pocket and hadn’t yet bothered to read. Anyway by the time we reached the motel at Calais old Tom had had a couple of big belts and was high and fell asleep over dinner so that we had hell’s own job getting him back to the motel. Jimmy, of course, had been instructed to share a double room with old Tom, but, naturally, it being our wedding night, Jimmy had other ideas so we registered at the motel as Mr and Mrs Phelan in the double and put old Tom in a single cabin next door.

  That was the first night I ever slept with a boy. It was a disaster. Jimmy knew even less than I did. I remember we went to bed in our underwear and after he had taken off my bra, he clutched me to him suddenly, pulled down his shorts, and ejaculated on my leg. And then we got all hotted up again, kissing and feeling each other, and after an awful lot of fumbling he ejaculated again, and again it was too soon. I felt like crying but didn’t and pretended it was all right and asked for a drink and Jimmy got out the bottle and I had my second drink in my life and we talked for a little while and then I felt sick and was sick and we talked some more and he kissed me and kissed my breasts and rubbed himself against me then, suddenly, fell asleep. I lay holding him for a while, then got up and was sick a second time. I have a vague memory of myself in that motel bathroom at four in the morning, sitting on the throne and telling myself, well you’ve done it now, this is the first real mortal sin in your life. And I didn’t mean the sins priests say are sins such as sex and drinking. I meant J
immy. I said to myself you are a rotten person, Mary Dunne, you’ve married him, yet you don’t even want to kiss him, let alone live with him the rest of your life. Talk about my rotten father, I felt I was twenty times as rotten as he ever was, I deserved to be sick, I deserved not to sleep, but I did sleep, I got back into bed beside Jimmy and we both slept a dead sleep until almost ten in the morning. When we woke up and saw the time, we panicked because what about old Tom, he had to be taken out for his breakfast. I dressed the way I used to dress when I was late for school and ran out into the snow, Jimmy just ahead of me, but old Tom’s cabin was empty, the door ajar.

  We turned and looked at each other. I remember we didn’t say a word, but ran together to the cabin marked ‘Office’ where there was a nice old lady behind a desk. ‘Good morning, dear,’ she said to me. ‘Your father’s gone up the road a piece, for breakfast. He’ll pick you up later.’

  Jimmy was standing behind me in the doorway. He turned and ran out, then came back in. ‘The car’s gone,’ he said. ‘But, how could it be? I had the keys.’

  And the old lady smiled. ‘You’re on your honeymoon, right?’ she said.

  We nodded. ‘Well,’ she said, ‘your dad came and explained that, so I made an exception and let him into your cabin, oh, about eight o’clock, I reckon. You were sound asleep, the pair of you.’ She smiled and winked. ‘He just took the car keys off your dresser and went out again like Santy Claus. We reckoned you both needed your beauty sleep.’

  Jimmy and I went outside. I remember to this day that I felt then the way I’d felt when I was a little girl and my ball hit and broke the window in McArdle’s Store and I ran away and an hour later they said a policeman was asking questions. I felt the same way that morning: I mean, too young to deal with this adult world we’d got mixed up in. We went back to our cabin and sat on the bed. Jimmy said old Tom would be back soon because his father had told Jimmy old Tom didn’t know how to handle money, therefore how would he be able to pay for his breakfast, so he’d realize he needed us and come back for us. But I didn’t believe Jimmy. I sat there thinking, look at us, we’re only married twenty-four hours and here we are sitting in this bedroom like two people married twenty years, worrying and worrying and he never even thought of kissing me this morning. I don’t think he even likes me, he just lusted after me, that was all. So we sat and talked and worried and then we walked up the road and got coffee and the people in the coffee shop didn’t remember seeing old Tom, so what else could we do, we were stranded, we went back to the motel and waited, it was awful, that wait, the morning was like weeks. At noon we made up our minds old Tom had ditched us, so we checked out and took a taxi into the town of Calais where Jimmy got his courage up and phoned the old father in Halifax. A servant answered and told Jimmy Mr Dawkins was on his way to Maine to pick up his son and Jimmy asked where old Tom had been found but the servant said he wasn’t allowed to answer any further questions. And that was that. We still had the expense money, we didn’t know what to do, we had some vague fear that my mother might have sent the Mounties after me and so, confused, like children, we decided to go back across the Canadian–American border and take a bus and go on to Toronto.

  I remember the moment, as we walked towards the border point, that we saw the Chrysler Imperial. I wanted to run away, but Jimmy had hopes he might be able to square things with old Tom and the old father, so we went into the customs and there, sure enough, was old Tom. What had happened was he had no car papers, or even a driver’s licence, and at first they had booked him on suspicion of drunken driving, but after talking a bit to him they’d twigged what he was and searched him and found a card sewn into his jacket with the old father’s address and phone number. And it seemed they had phoned the old father and he was on his way in a private plane he had chartered. So, although Jimmy kept trying to get the immigration men to release old Tom into our custody, it was no soap and we were still there an hour later when the old father phoned to say he’d landed at the local airport and when the cops mentioned Jimmy, the old father said to hold him, he was a crook, and so when the cop put the phone down he told Jimmy he would have to detain him. Jimmy at once told me to go back across the border into Canada and wait for him there, but I refused and I stayed there with him until the old father showed up and there was all hell breaking loose, but once the old father got his money back from Jimmy, plus the car keys and the papers, the American cops, who were sensible men, said the father had no charge against Jimmy and let Jimmy and me go back across the border. And there we were. We stood on the Canadian side and as we stood there, waiting for a bus, the Chrysler Imperial drove past with old Tom sitting up front beside his daddy and, as Tom went by, he turned around in his homburg hat and his overcoat with the astrakhan collar and, so help me, he put his thumb to his nose and spread his fingers and gave us the raspberry.

  We stood there in the snow, Jimmy and I, each of us with a suitcase, with that big murdering limousine splashing snowy slush on us as it went past, the old father sitting straight up behind the wheel and old Tom, thumb to his nose, his fat lips farting out a raspberry and at that moment I had the first real laugh of our married life. We just collapsed and embraced, and I remember thinking that maybe it had started so badly, we could only improve it and we’d make a go of it after all. We had forty-six dollars, enough to get us as far as Montreal if we ate only chocolate bars and chips, which we did, and then for a day and a night we didn’t eat at all while we sat around in Montreal waiting for answers to telegrams Jimmy had sent. (One to his older brother in New York, one to friend O’Keefe in Halifax.) At first we waited in the Greyhound Bus Terminal on Dorchester Street, but, after a Traveller’s Aid lady had asked me twice if I needed any help, we got nervous and moved to the waiting room in the Canadian Pacific Railway station on Windsor Street, where we snoozed away the night on benches and next morning went back to the Greyhound Bus Terminal to see if there were any replies to the telegrams. At noon, a telegram arrived from O’Keefe. He had wired sixty dollars which he said was his next week’s pay. ‘Good old O’Keefe,’ Jimmy yelled, hugging me, but I kept worrying how we would pay good old O’Keefe back.

  And so we bought bus tickets and went on to Toronto where we spent our first night apart, me at the YWCA, Jimmy at the men’s ‘Y’. The next morning we met before breakfast and read the want ads in the paper, then separated and went off to look for temporary jobs. And, miracle, miracle, we were both hired in the first jobs we applied for. Jimmy got taken on as a packer, stuffing shoppers’ grocery bags at a checkout counter in a Loblaws’ supermarket, while I was engaged that same morning as a Christmas help trainee by the T. Eaton Company. At lunch time that same day, I slipped out of the big T. Eaton store on Yonge Street, where they were giving us the training course, and ran down the street to the Canadian National Telegraphs office and wired my mother, saying I’d come to Toronto, had a job at the T. Eaton Company and would write soonest, best love, don’t worry. Nothing about being married to Jimmy Phelan. That would have been much too risky. I was under age, she could bring me back to Butchersville, and I guessed she would, if she ever found out that Jimmy and I, both Catholics, had been married in a Unitarian minister’s office which doesn’t count in the Catholic religion, I mean if both parties are Catholics.

  Anyway, after getting that wire away and easing my guilt a little, I went back to the T. Eaton Company and was shown how to make out a sales slip and told how T. Eaton had founded a great business and helped build up Canada because he was the first merchant in Canada to open a dry goods store with a strictly cash policy, but all through this I kept worrying about Mama, remembering how I had lied to her, and feeling depressed because Toronto wasn’t at all as I’d imagined it would be, not a bit like New York which I had been in for a long weekend when I was fifteen and not even as interesting as the part of Montreal we’d seen while we hung around the bus and railroad terminals there. And I worried about me and Jimmy and sex and so, by the end of the lecture on making out a
sales slip, I was ready to weep and went into the T. Eaton washroom, all prepared for a good, self-pitying cry. But I never did cry. For there was another woman crying there in the washroom, another of the Christmas help trainees, although she was old enough to be my mother, and when I asked what was wrong she said it was so long since she’d been to school she didn’t understand the same as you, dear (meaning me), and she didn’t get the part of the lecture about crediting a charge and so would be fired and she and her husband were in debt, Household Finance had closed in, she and her family had had to change their addresses twice and now daren’t answer the door in case it was someone from a collection agency, her husband had developed an ulcer with the worry and if she didn’t get this job today and make some money to help out . . . And by this time she was becoming incoherent and I, frightened by this tale of people getting in debt and living close to the line (we’d already spent nearly all the money O’Keefe had lent us), told her to hold on, wait a minute, then went out and borrowed a sales book, sat down with her and went over and over the charge crediting procedure until I was sure she had it right. After which she kissed me and said God would reward me and if ever she could help me with anything I was just to ask her. Then we went to another lecture and I learned that T. Eaton worked hard all his life, harder than any of his employees, and was sometimes too tired to eat his supper at night and always put the customer first which we must do too. Then we went to the cafeteria for a cup of tea and the woman I had helped sat next to me and when I asked her what part of the city would be cheap to live in, she got a Toronto Star and went over the Room to Let ads with me. The one she circled was Blodgett’s and that was how we ended up, Jimmy and I, living with Harry and Mother.